Tag: A Century of Cinema

I’ve been looking at my Century of Cinema progress and been… I don’t know, maybe a bit bothered that so far it’s leaned somewhat heavily on horror. That’s because I do have a fair bit of that sort of thing in my collection waiting to be watched (and indeed rewatched), but my general taste is broader than just the horror end of things and I’ve felt like I should maybe cast a slightly wider net than that… so, for title #30*, I looked at the unwatched videos on my hard drive for something a bit more serious and arthouse, and picked this. And yeah, “serious and arthouse” was what I got. Woof. I think I may need something trashier to balance me out after this…

Anyway, this is based on the novel of the same name by Olaf Stapledon, fairly famous SF novel from 1930 that, frankly, I’ve tried but failed to read in the past… from what I can see, this mostly just retains the plot conceit that the 18th and last human race is contacting us, the first human race, from two billion years in the future; the story of the intermediate races is kind of passed over. Also, this is one of the most abstract book adaptations I’ve ever seen; the only things that appear on screen (there’s no humans involved apart from Tilda Swinton as the narrator from the end of humanity) are spomeniks, the old Yugoslavia’s somewhat perplexing WW2 memorial monuments. They’re as bizarre in this film as I suppose they must be in reality, these giant abstract concrete things that just appear in random parts of the landscape. All of this originated as a multimedia event (played here in Sydney among other places) by composer Johann Johannsson, who died of a drug overdose before the film was finished; there is quite some beauty to it (the monochrome Super 16mm film visuals are often stunning), but the thing is quite plodding and felt a lot longer than its 71 minutes given that it doesn’t exactly follow a conventional narrative or plot. Still, I can’t say it didn’t give me what I was looking for from it, so there’s that.

*You may notice I haven’t actually made that many posts for this tag, which is because some of them have been rewatches of films I reviewed years ago at my old film blog. Apart from The Unknown and The Naked Gun, I haven’t felt any need to say anything else about those ones.

So Indicator in the UK released a couple of very early Mexican horror films on blu-ray… I watched the first of those (La Llorona from 1933) a couple of years ago and finally struck the other off the list tonight. The earlier film is somewhat handicapped by existing only in fairly shitty condition (3rd or 4th generation 16mm print; mind you, for decades it wasn’t thought to exist at all, so better than nothing), and it appears Phantom here only circulated in similar condition for ages… fortunately, this one was restorable from the original negative, which is good cos I think this would’ve been even harder going in an inferior print. So, a love triangle—two men and the wife of one of the latter—get lost in a forest on a night-time walk, but a mysterious passing stranger leads rhem to a nearby monastery where they can take shelter for the night. Against the husband’s better judgement, they follow him, but the monastery (untouched by time, not to mention modern dentistry) is not entirely what it seems, and as the night goes on it looks like history may be about to horribly repeat. The true nature of the monastery is telegraphed about halfway through, but the characters are too dense to fully realise this, and the characters being irritating is one thing that got in the way of me fully enjoying this (the leaden pacing being the other main issue, 85 minutes of this really is about 20 if not 30 too many). I actually will give it points, though, for not fully explaining everything, I think keeping some details obscure actually works for it, and the stunning location does a lot of heavy lifting… the film was shot in an actual monastery, so the film at least has atmosphere to spare and often looks quite remarkable, which makes up for its other shortcomings.

Up for comedy again tonight. I actually first saw this on the big screen as part of a Cinematheque double bill… can’t remember now what the other film was, but I remember loving this, and I loved it again tonight. I haven’t always been convinced by what I’ve seen of the boys’ features so far (possibly they were better suited to shorts), but this one works for me. Fairly simple plot again, with Stan & Ollie making their way through the old West in search of a young lady for whom they have a special package, namely, the deed to a gold mine she’s inherited. Of course, because they’re Stan and Ollie, they can’t not get this perfectly easy task terribly wrong, which leaves them with the problem of getting it back and safely delivered into the right hands. This is a great showcase for James Finlayson, L&H’s most important third wheel, but obviously Stan & Ollie themselves are the top draw here (it has to be said, Rosina Lawrence is not exactly well used as the good girl), and the film features some of the funniest comedy sequences I’ve seen in any film. Stan & Ollie’s dance to “Commence the Dancing”. “The Trail of the Lonesome Pine”, possibly the most implausible 1970s pop hit ever (only kept from the top of the UK charts by “Bohemian Rhapsody”). Stan just losing his shit during the tickling scene (his hilarity face is one of the greatest things in cinema). The hat-eating business. The attempted break-in where their mule inadvertently rises to the upper floor of the saloon. All this within a fairly tight 64 minutes, so it doesn’t exactly slack off much. Like I said, it doesn’t use Rosina Lawrence well, I think her character could’ve done more than she actually does, but any quibbles I have with the film like that are pretty much overcome by how good the thing is on the whole. I think this may be the first time I’ve seen this since that Cinemathque screening, and I am as pleased tonight as I was then.

Oh, I needed this tonight. There has been some discourse about the new Naked Gun with Liam Neeson that currently appears to be coming out in August; I saw the first trailer for it the other day and am… well, not entirely convinced. I wasn’t sure that it felt like a “Naked Gun movie”, if you know what I mean, but the concluding joke about OJ Simpson was gold and you can’t always take a trailer as being necessarily indicative of the whole film (which I will likely wind up seeing at some point)… and, to be sure, the original film doesn’t exactly feel like Police Squad!, the TV series that inspired it, either. It strikes me now that it’s actually kind of like how the Monty Python movies relate to the Python TV series, in that both clearly relished the opportunity to not only spend a ton of extra money but also to do jokes that were rather more crass than they could’ve gotten away with on TV in those days (“sexual assault with a concrete DILDO!”)… In any case, the new film inspired me to dig out the old one, which I haven’t seen in years. I don’t have the same relationship with the film as I do the series, in that I kept finding new jokes the series even twenty years after first watching it; the film doesn’t really offer me new discoveries like that. But on this rewatch I think I did get a new sense of just how immaculate the comic timing is throughout the film (something like “Drebin!” “Frank!” “You’re both right” is so much funnier than it seems on paper because of how Ricardo Montalban, Priscilla Presley and Leslie Nielsen all deliver it), and just how well cast all the characters are. I still think it runs out of puff a bit in the baseball game climax, and some of the period references are very dated, but for the most part what an absolute delight The Naked Gun still is. The new version is going to have a hard time living up to it.

So, the logical next step after last night’s film, which as I said screenwriter Curt Siodmak kind of extended into his novel Donovan’s Brain, would be to watch an actual film version of said novel, wouldn’t it? Therefore I did precisely that tonight… for reasons best known to themselves, Republic decided to conceal it under this frankly kind of shit title that represents it poorly (albeit less so than the poster); fortunately the film itself was a lot better than the title might suggest. I first heard of it via Bill Everson‘s book on horror classics, where he’s very positive about this one, but ungallant at best towards its female lead, Vera Ralston… little Vera had originally been a figure skater in Czechslovakia who Republic chief Herbert Yates was kind of obsessed by and determined to make into a star; he did eventually make her Mrs Yates, but stardom never exactly happened. Ultimately she would be his undoing when the company’s stockholders booted Yates out of the business after making 20 films with her, of which supposedly only two were successes. Per IMDB, John Wayne refused to work with her because he didn’t want her poor strike rate to damage his own career, and this film’s director, George Sherman, supposedly quit Republic entirely rather than suffer through another production with her ever again. I’m going to make the bold statement that I didn’t think she was actually that bad; the accent was far less thick than I’d expected and she does OK for someone who had so little English she had to learn her lines phonetically. She is, still, outshone by Erich von Stroheim and Richard Arlen in the male lead roles, the former as the doctor who saves Donovan’s brain, the latter as the man the brain tries to take over. The plot is more complicated than it initially looks—ultimately Donovan tries to posthumously atone for framing his son for a murder he committed—and allowing the film a nearly 90-minute runtime rather than the hour and change most horror films of the time got allows it to breathe. I’ve said elsewhere that I’ve never thought the 1940s was exactly a great age for horror cinema, but this one shows how good the genre could be even then. Liked this a lot. Just… that title.

So, a bit more Karloff for the later hours; this time he’s the main attraction and does things, and instead this film underuses Bela Lugosi… oh well. This is quite some mad scientist stuff, with Karloff as the scientist in question; his university professor friend is literally caught in the crossfire of a battle between a criminal and the erstwhile members of his gang (one of these being Lugosi, second billed but nowhere near as prominent in the film as Karloff and third-billed Stanley Ridges). Both men are grievously wounded, and when Karloff discovers the gangster has a half-million dollar fortune hidden somewhere, he finds himself fighting to keep both of them alive… in the one body. It took me longer than it perhaps should’ve done to realise that Ridges actually plays both roles, just with a change of makeup and tone of voice; it’s not quite Jekyll & Hyde, but it’s along similar lines, I suppose. Story’s by Curt Siodmak, with this film being one of his earliest Hollywood jobs, and he expanded on the idea in his book Donovan’s Brain and its various film versions and follow-ups; director Arthur Lubin’s career began on Poverty Row, where he gained a reputation for efficiency that soon took him to Universal, and you can kind of see that in this one… we are pretty much dealing with post-Laemmle faemmle Universal here, when the studio was pulling back on budgets and kind of going for B status, but Lubin uses his fairly limited resources well. It clocks in at just 70 minutes, but it packs quite an amount of Stuff Happening into that time, and there’s some amazing shadows in the scene where Ridges’ crook goes to retrieve his ill-gotten gains; it’s almost unnecessarily atmospheric but it undeniably adds something despite that. So on the whole, yeah, I liked this, it’s an honest B film with some nice central performances. Just wish Lugosi had been given more to do…

For some reason this is sometimes marketed and sold as a horror film, but it’s piss all of the sort; I used to use this old toplist at ICheckMovies as a bit of a viewing project, but was always unsatisfied by some of the inclusions on it (The Virgin Spring is horror? Just because Wes Craven knocked it off for Last House on the Left? Be serious. And I’ve always had reservations about classing gialli as horror films), of which this was one… and there’s a bunch of other lists there featuring it, many sourced from books on the subject by Carlos Clarens, Scream Factory’s Universal horror collection, Time Out magazine, that sort of thing. But it’s not a horror film, despite some of the people involved; it’s a pretty straight and fairly dry historical drama about Richard III’s ascent to the throne. Vincent Price was one of the secondary cast here in one of his earliest film roles, and he would go on to play Richard in Roger Corman’s 1962 remake; I saw the latter many years ago, and remarked on my old blog about the ho-hum characters and irritating American accents. I see no real reason not to level the same criticisms against the 1939 version too; even Richard (Basil Rathbone here) isn’t particularly interesting here somehow. Boris Karloff tries his best as the latter’s torturer Mord, but he doesn’t get enough to do. And Richard’s battle for the throne is nothing compared to the duelling accents, with a grim fight between varying American flavours clashing with actual English voices. For something set in such a specific time and place, the lack of effort the Hollywood mob make is kind of galling. Mostly well-enough made (bar the fighting scenes, which were a technical nightmare for multiple reasons and wound up frankly looking a bit shit), but only Price really goes at it with the sort of teethmarks-in-scenery bravado it needed more of.

Apart from the Wallace & Gromit film, I think this is my favourite first-time watch in the Century of Cinema project so far. This was one of the last big European silent film productions, and like an awful lot of silent cinema it then proceeded to vanish for decades, with a print only turning up as recently as 2008. The blu-ray also includes its even longer-lost 1914 predecessor, which the booklet essay (handily reproduced here) compares to a Louis Feuillade serial rather than Doyle; both were the work of Richard Oswald, who wrote the 1914 and directed this one. I gather the 1929 version is more faithful to the book—for one thing Watson is actually in it, which he apparently isn’t in the earlier film—though it clearly retains some Feuillade-ish elements in its latter stages. Still, if not exactly pure Doyle, it’s a terrific watch, and I’ll illustrate with a few shots:

There’s some really tremendous atmospherics throughout the film, and the camerawork is remarkably mobile even for a 1920s German film, so you get a great sense of the size of the Baskerville Hall interior among other things. It’s a compact story, unfortunately rendered a bit more compact by the loss of much of reels two and three from the only known print; some of this (plus bits of reel 5) has been filled in by footage from the 9.5mm copy that Pathe produced for home viewing (apparently, though the film never got an American release, it did good enough business in Europe to merit a “home video” release, but the rest had to be filled in with stills and title cards explaining the missing scenes (Watson arriving at Baskerville Hall, establishing the Barrymores and Stapletons). But it’s not really distracting, and the rest of the film is great. I think we can fairly describe this as a major rediscovery, and its reputation will hopefully grow.